E3 2010: Metal Gear Solid: Rising Mixes Stealth and Swordplay

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Developers of multiplatform PS3 and Xbox 360 title aiming for new type of MGS experience.

By Anoop Gantayat

Think Metal Gear Solid: Rising is all sword play? You may have been left with that impression following the game's impressive E3 trailer, shown at Microsoft's press conference on Monday. But it turns out there's a lot more to the game than just precision slashing with Raiden's blade.

In this week's Famitsu, producer Shigenobu Matsuyama and director Mineshi Kimura detailed some of their plans for the new game. These two are overseeing development on Rising in place of Hideo Kojima, who's serving as the game's executive producer. Matsuyama is the person who introduced Rising at the Microsoft press conference following the brief appearance by Kojima.

As suggested by the trailer, the focus of the game is on sword play. The development staff has equipped the game with precision slicing mechanics that let you slash at enemies in different areas. Depending on the positions of your slashes, you'll receive different rewards.

We saw one reward sequence in the E3 trailer as Raiden took the spinal cord of a fallen enemy cyborg and absorbed its energy. This is how Raiden, himself a cyborg at this point in the Metal Gear solid chronology, gets energy. The fact that different types of slashes lead to different rewards will contribute to the strategy.

The big question on everyone's mind is how exactly you'll make those precision cuts. The trailer seemed to hint at some sort of bullet time-like slow motion feature for when you get up close with your blade. Combine that with the recent Move and Kinect announcements, and there's been some speculation that Rising would have an option for motion controls. Unfortunately, this area was not touched upon in the interview.

You'll be able to slice up quite a bit outside of just enemies, including large, complex machines like cars, and even environmental objects like pillars and walls. Implementing such a free gameplay system required that the team model areas they normally wouldn't, as it's possible that you'll now end up seeing the innards of background objects.

You don't have total freedom, though. The game does place some limitations on what parts of the environment you can chop up, something that Kimura said was implemented in order to prevent the game from becoming hard to play.

You'll also find a few limitations in how you chop up the enemies. Some enemies have thick armor, which you may need to work your way around. This particular limitation appears to be a part of the gameplay.

While not shown in the trailer, Rising will also have elements of stealth. Players can choose to play the game using sneak mechanics like a more conventional MGS game, or those who are more confident in their action skills and jump direction into the fight.

He'll never dance again.

Matsuyama noted that those who go the stealth way will still find a different experience from past MGS games, thanks in part to Raiden's greater speed. This is in line with one of the goals for the game, of making an MGS of different forms from past titles.

The Rising seems to have achieved just that, and we can't wait to get our hands on it. With gameplay footage at last debuting this past week, we hopefully won't have to wait too long to see how Rising's play mechanics actually work with a controller in hand.